A Personal Note

Dear Readers,

The second edition of the BPM book has been published in May 2012. I worked on the revision from late 2011 through spring 2012, with most intensive times in the first weeks of 2012. The changes can be summarized as follows:

In the orchestrations chapter, I significantly updated the BPMN section to cover now also new language concepts in business process diagrams available in the current version of BPMN.

In the choreographies chapter, I added a section on BPMN, covering conversation diagrams and choreography diagrams. In that chapter I also talk about analysis of process choreographies.

I completely rewrote the methodologies chapter, which is now much better connected to the other parts of the book. It explains how relationships between business processes are identified, how transfer of results between processes can be improved and how process landscapes can be set up.

In addition to these major changes, there were many minor changes and corrections. I hope that you like the book and that it will serve as standard textbook in business process management for the years to come. If you have comments or if you find a mistake or something unclear, please drop me a note at mathias dot weske at hpi.uni-potsdam.de.

Thanks and happy reading!

Mathias Weske

Potsdam, May 22, 2012

Back Cover Text

Business process management is usually treated from two different perspectives: business administration and computer science. While business administration professionals tend to consider information technology as a subordinate aspect in business process management for experts to handle, by contrast computer science professionals often consider business goals and organizational regulations as terms that do not deserve much thought but require the appropriate level of abstraction.

Mathias Weske argues that all communities involved need to have a common understanding of the different aspects of business process management. To this end, he details the complete business process lifecycle from the modeling phase to process enactment and improvement, taking into account all different stakeholders involved. After starting with a presentation of general foundations and abstraction models, he explains concepts like process orchestrations and choreographies, as well as process properties and data dependencies. Finally, he presents both traditional and advanced business process management architectures, covering, for example, workflow management systems, service-oriented architectures, and data-driven approaches. In addition, he shows how standards like WfMC, SOAP, WSDL, and BPEL fit into the picture.

This textbook is ideally suited for classes on business process management, information systems architecture, and workflow management. This 2nd edition contains major updates on BPMN Version 2 process orchestration and process choreographies, and the chapter on BPM methodologies has been completely rewritten. The accompanying website www.bpm-book.com contains further information and additional teaching material.

Citations

This book presents comprehensive and updated material for anyone interested in getting to know the vast field of BPM. With its excellent organization and use of many figures, it can also be an excellent choice as a text book on BPM.

An extremely well rounded and comprehensive discussion of the subject of business process management

Heiko Ludwig, IBM Research, San Jose, CA, USA

A superb textbook for students in both computer science and business administration. Moreover, it is also very useful for practitioners since it provides a comprehensive coverage of BPM independently of industry hypes around workflow management, business process management, and service-oriented architectures.

from the Foreword by Wil van der Aalst, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

Business process management (BPM) is a topic more pressing than ever even 15 years after its inception. Mathias Weske takes an up-to-date, fresh, and comprehensive look at the subject and connects a number of areas to which BPM applies, from a conceptual as well as a technical and an application-oriented point of view. A definitive must-read for anybody studying or working in this area.

Gottfried Vossen, European Research Center for Information Systems, University of Muenster